Roundhouse Blog: The Fat Girl Gets A Haircut and Other Stories

The Fat Girl Gets a Haircut and Other Stories is an original work created by artist Mark Storor in collaboration with a cast of young actors. In the show, the candid tales – on themes of love, family, sexuality and religion – are revealed in 13 explicit portraits.

A boy collects tears in carefully labelled jam jars; a girl is horrified that her best friend thinks her father is ‘hot’; a boy bricks himself up in a Lego tower; and a young girl wears her mother’s shoes…

With a live band, animation and video in a 360-degree setting, The Fat Girl Gets a Haircut and Other Stories creates a vision of the world as experienced through the prism of teenage years.

Over the past 18 months, the company has been working to create an extraordinary, striking piece of theatre with stories at its heart. Throughout the final six weeks of rehearsals, the company will be blogging on AYT about the show as it prepares to take to the stage in the Roundhouse’s iconic main space.

Monday 14th March 2011

Rosie Funniest. Rehearsal. Ever. It involved four members of the cast sitting in a paddling pool laughing until our bellies were weak and aching. Here’s how it all began…

We started the rehearsal in the Roundhouse main space and watched some of Babis’s (the show’s Animator) beautiful animations, projected on the curtains hanging around the performance space, just as they will be in the show. This captured our imaginations and inspired us as we worked on exploring the creation of transitions between our stories. The process evolved into a wild goose chase, with various props and materials. Meanwhile, Jules and Gabby (members of band) created improvised sounds that responded to our movements. We knew we’d hit on something good, and by the end of the session our excitement levels were even higher. When we decided we’d had enough excitement for one day, we sat down for pizza. But we couldn’t contain our enthusiasm and soon we were up and running about again, then into the pool… and ended up in hysterics. We hope the show has the same effect on the audience.

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Ashleigh Since we arrived in it on Sunday, the main space has really started to seem like home – we were definitely starting to feel as though the show had outgrown the hub (the smaller space we have been rehearsing in for months). And whoever said “only so much can happen in a day” had clearly never been to a Fat Girl rehearsal.

It seems there is a Fat Girl in all of us, who is determined to make an impression though fairground fun. Experimenting in-the-round over the past couple of days has given us the opportunity to run riot, get foam in our eyes, feathers in our mouths and smiles on our faces.

The best thing about moving into the main space this week is that it has allowed us to fill the space and let our imaginations grow. We’ve experimented with animations that represent freedom and intimacy, and basically created a little world of our own. We would love for you to be a part of it.

More adventures from the Fat Girl Gets A Haircut and Other Stories cast next week…